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Does Church Attendance Cause People to Vote? Using Blue Laws

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Does Church Attendance Cause People to Vote? Using Blue Laws Does church attendance cause people to vote? Using blue laws’ repeal to estimate the effect of religiosity on voter turnout Alan Gerber, Yale and NBER Jonathan Gruber, MIT and NBER Daniel M. Hungerman, Notre Dame and NBER* This Version: May 2010 Abstract Regular church attendance is strongly associated with a higher probability of voting. It is an open question as to whether this association, which has been confirmed in numerous surveys, is causal. We use the repeal of the laws restricting Sunday retail activity (“blue laws”) to measure the effects of church-going on political participation. The repeal of blue laws caused a 5 percent decrease in church attendance. We measure the effect of blue laws’ repeal on political participation and find that following the repeal turnout falls by approximately 1 percentage point. This turnout decline is consistent with the large effect of church attendance on turnout reported in the literature, and suggests that church attendance may have significant causal effect on voter turnout. We also find that the decline in turnout appears to affect Democratic but not Republican vote shares, and that the effect of blue laws appears to be stronger for Catholics than for others. * We thank Tracy Liu and in particular Gabriel Durazo for assistance in collecting the Blue Laws data, and Shang Ha for research assistance. We also thank seminar participants at Notre Dame for comments. We are grateful to James Snyder, who supplied the election data. This work was supported by the Metanexus Institute and the Yale University Institution for Social and Policy Studies. Introduction For a large number of Americans, attending religious services is a routine and important part of life. On an average Sunday roughly one-fourth of the U.S. population attends religious services, and roughly half of the population attends religious services at least monthly.1 Donations to churches and other religious organizations make up a plurality (and by some estimates a majority) of charitable contributions (Andreoni, 2006). Over two-thirds of Americans belong to a church or other religious organization (Iannaccone, 1998). Despite the broad reach and clear importance of religious observance, there has been relatively little progress in measuring how church attendance shapes the choices people make and the attitudes they hold. There are strong correlations between the degree of religious observance and a wide variety of pro-social behaviors and positive health outcomes. For example, there is a well-known positive association between attending religious services and political participation; those reporting regular church attendance are much more likely to vote (e.g. Rosenstone and Hansen 1993; Verba, Schlozman, and Brady 1995). Prior work has found that, controlling for socioeconomic characteristics, age, gender, and political conditions, those who report attending church weekly are between 10 and 15 percentage points more likely to vote, a difference roughly equal to the gap in turnout between a presidential and midterm election. It is unclear how these correlations between religiosity and various outcomes should be interpreted. Do these associations measure the causal effect of church attendance, or do they capture long and short run differences in those who choose to attend church and those who do not? In the case of church attendance and voting, it is quite plausible that a person who enjoys participating in church life (an activity which involves listening to speeches, meeting with others, volunteering, and organizing) would also enjoy participating in politics. Short-run factors may be at work as well. Those who are new to an area may have less religious involvement and it is well established that on average people who have recently moved are less likely to vote. A larger point is that even a seemingly robust catalogue of specific 1 Figures based on calculations of GSS data from 1973 to 1998. 1 conjectures about how churchgoers may differ from non-churchgoers runs the risk of overlooking important sources of difference. We measure the effect of church attendance by observing the consequences of the decline in church attendance that followed a policy change. In recent decades, long-standing restrictions on Sunday retail activity, often referred to as “blue laws,” were repealed. In a recent paper, Gruber and Hungerman argue that a consequence of permitting Sunday morning shopping was to reduce the relative appeal of Sunday morning church attendance. They provide compelling evidence that there was a notable decline in church attendance following the repeal of blue laws (Gruber and Hungerman, 2008). We extend this earlier work to examine whether the repeal of the blue laws was also associated with a decline in voting in presidential and mid-term elections, which is what is predicted to occur if church attendance promotes political participation. We find that the repeal of the blue laws resulted in an approximately one percentage point fall in the percentage of the population that turns out to vote. Additionally, there is little evidence that the repeal of blue laws was preceded by a decline in voter participation or a decline in religious participation; the results here are not driven by “reverse causality.” We also find that the decline in turnout appears to affect Democratic but not Republican vote shares, and that the effect of blue laws appears to be stronger for Catholics than for others. These findings have implications for the larger question of how citizen engagement in voluntary associations affects society. Citizen involvement in religious organizations, unions, civic groups, and clubs is often credited with creating networks of communication and fostering trust and reciprocity among members of society. The “social capital” created by such organizations is cited by some as an important determinant of the quality of political and economic performance (e.g., Putnam 2000). If church attendance is determined to have a causal effect on political participation, this would provide a valuable example of how participation in voluntary organizations has a causal effect on the political sphere as social capital theorists maintain. Establishing whether church attendance has a causal effect on participation also has implications for our understanding of mass politics and for evaluating the full range of consequences that follow from 2 public policy toward religious organizations. For instance, one important feature of churches is that their membership is not concentrated among the highest socioeconomic strata, and so a genuine mobilizing effect from church attendance might counteract some of the class biases in political participation (Brady, Schlozman, Verba, and Luks 2008). Our paper proceeds as follows. Section 1 reviews the literature linking religiosity and political behavior. Section 2 discusses the history of blue laws and the identification strategy. Section 3 presents the estimation results. Section 4 discusses the implications of our findings, some of their limitations, and directions for future investigation. Section 1. Literature Review There is a large body of work documenting correlations between church attendance and various pro-social behaviors. In particular, attending church has been linked to: lower levels of criminal activity (Evans, Cullen, Dunaway and Burton, 1995; Lipford, McCorkmick, and Tollison, 1993; Hull and Bold, 1995), lower rates of delinquency (Bachman et al. 2002; Johnson et al 2000.; Wallace and Williams, 1987), lower rates of substance abuse (National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse, 2001), better health status and outcomes (Levin and Vanderpool, 1987; Hummer, Rogers, Nam, and Ellison, 1999), and greater marital stability (Lehrer and Chiswick, 1993). Religiosity is also strongly correlated with self- reports of well-being (Ellison 1991, Hout and Greeley 2003), and recent work has found that differences between those reporting never attending church and those reporting attending church weekly is comparable to the boost in happiness from moving from the bottom to the top income quartile (Gruber and Mullainathan, 2002). Voter turnout is also strongly associated with religious observance. There is a robust and large positive association between turnout and citizens’ frequency of church attendance. Rosenstone and Hansen (1993) pool survey data from several decades of American National Election Studies and regress turnout on reported church attendance and a collection of additional variables, including age, income, gender, and education. They estimate that those who report attending church every week or almost every 3 week are 15.1 percentage points more likely to report voting in presidential election and 10.2 percentage points more likely to report voting in mid-term elections than those who say they do not attend religious services (Rosenstone and Hansen, 1993, Tables D-1 and D-4). Verba, Schlozman, and Brady (1995) perform a similar analysis, predicting turnout in a larger set of elections. Using the data from the 2,500 respondent Citizen Participation Study survey, Verba, Schlozman, and Brady confirm the strong correlation between church attendance and turnout (Verba, Schlozman, and Brady 1995).2 Other research has focused on the relationship between church going and turnout for particular ethnic or racial subgroups. A positive relationship between religious participation and voting has been demonstrated for Asian Americans (Wong et al, 2005), Latinos (Jones-Correa and Leal, 2001), Muslims
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